Although the plural of anecdote is not evidence, I'd like to share some personal observations on the whole net generation discussion. One important didactical principle is that you prepare the ground for learning new things in finding connections with what you already know.

A large part of this post is based on a column I wrote in January 2009 on http://www.surfspace.nl, SURF can be seen as the Dutch counterpart of JISC. The column had the title 'Net Generation bestaat niet' (The net generation doesn't exist - http://www.surfspace.nl/nl/Columns/Pages/NetGenerationbestaatniet.aspx).

Anecdote 1

One of the things I have been trying to do at Jacobs University is to use web 2.0 technology to bring the library experience closer to where the users are, rather than having our patrons come to the library homepage and sort it out from there. To that end we developed a catalog widget that you could put on any web page you like, or put on your desktop in an app dock. When we demonstrated a first iteration of this catalog widget to some of our students, they liked it. However, when we asked them whether they would also like this widget as a Facebook app (practically all of our students are on Facebook), their faces went blank. Drilling down, it turned out that none of them knew exactly what a Facebook app is. They might be playing Farmville, but the concept of an app was foreign to them. To them, Facebook basically is the wall, where you post messages and pictures. So much for their supposed (or assumed) technological avant gardism.

Anecdote 2

Jacobs University has a spamming tradition. There are numerous lists and staff, students and faculty really don't care to how many lists they send a message, even though it might be about selling a 10 euro railroad ticket. The worst list is jacobs-talk which can generate tens of thousands of mails, sometimes bringing our mailservers down. In order to relieve our burdened mail servers, we proposed to move some of the lists to Confluence, our enterprise wiki / blog solution. With most modern mail clients having RSS readers built in, we could only see advantages. Our students didn't even know what RSS was, and couldn't be convinced to move away from spamming.

Anecdote 3

Similar to anecdote 2. Jacobs hasn't much of a learning strategy, let alone an e-learning strategy, so should be very careful when it comes to investing in a LMS. We had outdated discussion boards supporting learning and teaching. We created an alternative in Confluence were we automagically created course workspaces based on data in our student / course management system. Students hate Confluence, faculty hardly use it, when they use it, it's for uploading Powerpoint files of their lecture slides.

Anyway, these experiences concurred with what I was reading at the time. One was a huge metastudy by Rolf Schulmeister, Germany's e-learning guru. who is also quoted in the Spiegel article that is on the reading list for this week IDEL. He, Schulmeister, looked at circa 46 studies to conclude that, yes there are new media, but if you look at media use by young people it's mainly for entertainment purposes and for keeping in touch with there friends. (Rolf Schulmeister (2008), Gibt es eine "Net Generation'? (Is there a net generation?), http://www.zhw.uni-hamburg.de/pdfs/Schulmeister_Netzgeneration.pdf (accessed September 28, 2010). Schulmeister also gives the important warning that rather than focus on a minority group of students, the differences in learning styles of students are probably much more important. To me, accommodating different learning styles could be one of the strong points of e-learning, because the technology, in principle, offers flexibility.

The other thing I was reading at the time was the 2008 ECAR study of undergraduate technology use (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EKF/ekf0808.pdf, accesses September 28, 2010). The ECAR studies are also frequently mentioned in the special issue on net generation of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning that I went through last week. The same picture emerges, the majority of students prefer traditional teachers / teaching, only a minority is into web 2.0 as an active user.

The more important discussion is what the implications of such findings are for the e-learning debate. Of course it is fun to dismiss Tapscott, Prensky, and Oblinger, but their stories, apparantly not based on strong evidence. or rather no evidence at all, do have an important message. And that message is that we are teaching in a centuries old fashion to a world that has changed considerably. Just to use myself as an example, oops yet another anecdote, when I had obtained my economics degree in 1982, I vowed to myself that I would never pursue another degree. And yet, here I am enrolled in the MScEL program. What I meant in 1982: please no more boring lectures, workgroups with uninterested fellow students, based on core reading alone. I like learning, but the average university setting is an impediment to learning for people like me. E-learning, and that's the message I took from Oblinger and Tapscott (I have yet to read Prensky) can make learning more engaging and fun and, like, real world like.